Nila Leiserowitz, regional managing principal, Gensler

Nila Leiserowitz, regional managing principal in Chicago for architecture and design firm Gensler, walks through Whole Foods Inc.'s regional office in Chicago. Her team designed the space at 640 N. LaSalle St., and it's in keeping with the style of the retailer's natural food stores.

Walking into a new corporate space her team designed in River North for Whole Foods Market Inc., Nila Leiserowitz pointed out a long lunch table visible from the front entrance instead of hidden in a back room.

If it weren't for a few cubicles and some offices, a visitor might try to check out with a few canned goods, and that's by design. Why does the grocer's Midwest regional office need to look like one of its stores?

"There's a consistency here around the story the company is trying to tell," said Leiserowitz, 58, who became regional managing principal in Chicago for San Francisco-based architecture and design giant Gensler a little more than a year ago. "You walk in and see blackboards and posters about an upcoming fundraiser, and the space seems to have life. It's dynamic and changing, and no space feels more important than another."

Gone -- long gone, in fact -- are the days when designing a corporate space meant slotting in some file cabinets and an impressive corner office.

A more technology-savvy, holistic philosophy informs the firm's work today, including its current job on the design team for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago's new research hospital at 630 N. McClurg Court.

In a nutshell, it's about making clients more comfortable, workers more creative or, in this case, patients healthier.

The Rehabilitation Institute tapped Gensler and Omaha-based firm HDR in June for the Streeterville high-rise project.

In a statement last summer announcing the deal, the institute's CEO, Dr. Joanne Smith, said the new hospital will set "a new benchmark for rehabilitation medicine in the world."

The goal is to bring the latest in rehabilitation research more directly into the patient setting.

It was the first major win for Leiserowitz since coming to Chicago after running the firm's Los Angeles-area office, where her clients included DreamWorks and Sony.

On its heels, the firm is going after other health-oriented clients.

A marathon runner and mountain climber, Leiserowitz refers to the business as "wellness and health," instead of the other way around, to emphasize the goal of keeping people healthy.

"Nila was central to winning the (Rehabilitation Institute) business and leading the effort" of sketching out how the patient spaces will accommodate innovative therapies and equipment while maintaining a comfortable, healing environment, said Lamar Johnson, the other regional managing principal for Gensler in Chicago. Together, Johnson and Leiserowitz are responsible for about 400 employees, including 210 in Chicago and the remainder in Minneapolis, La Crosse, Wis., and Detroit.

"We're the perfect matched set," Johnson said. "She's interiors, while I'm more of a core architecture and mixed-use guy. She handles HR issues, and I take the finance piece. She oversees Minneapolis, and I have Detroit," he said, referring to two of the region's other Midwest offices.

"I knew things were going to work out when people stopped asking both of us what to do about the same issue," he said. "For a while it was like we were the parents, and people would ask both of us for something, thinking that if they didn't like the answer from mom they could go to dad."

That kind of subterfuge is likely made difficult because Leiserowitz's and Johnson's offices are separated by a glass wall at Gensler's Loop office.

The glass is another form-following-function example, Leiserowitz said.

"It's about being very transparent," she said. "Our space is open.''

In fact, her office doesn't have a door, a reminder to staff that she's always accessible, Leiserowitz said.

Now at the top of the corporate interior design field at one of the world's largest architecture and design firms (debt-free Gensler logged $574 million in revenue last year and took on 500 new employees, giving it 3,200 as of the first quarter), Leiserowitz worked her way up the ladder and came of age when corner offices behind mahogany doors ruled the landscape.

That command-and-control image has slowly given way to more egalitarian spaces designed to reflect companies' individual missions and inspire creativity in workers, and Leiserowitz has been at the forefront of that trend.

While working her first job out of the University of Minnesota at a Minneapolis design firm, she met Gary Wheeler, a designer on staff at the university as it built a new law school, through a mutual friend.